Switching to WordPress felt like a visit to the Ferengi homeworld

Counterpoint: I've had a Wordpress blog for almost 20 years, I've never paid anyone a dime. I don't know PHP, and I only use two plugins, both of them free. With a little bit of Googling you can just hack together whatever you need, because there is a lot of documentation for Wordpress. The author is a web dev, so I'm surprised their first thought was that they needed a plugin to load a font.

As someone who is on a, uh, &quot;sabbatical&quot; from programing after 10 years making WP work for gov, edu, and various businesses I have worked on many hundreds of WP sites.<p>I still use it for my personal blog and for marketing my various projects.<p>The article doesn&#x27;t have a lot of meat, but I think the title alone was interesting.<p>My primary issue with the WP ecosystem is how folks end up paying for GPL software.<p>Leaving aside my opinions about the actual legal weight of commercial plugins in that ecosystem, having a bunch of systems with un-patchable software (until you pay for the latest release) has caused a whole lot of problems for the world.<p>There are other problems with WP of course. I&#x27;m completely burned out on trying to fix things with it, so hopefully I can find some other work when I get done trying to be a musician.<p>However, I find the community is quite unique in its lack of tolerance for the idea that GPL means GPL.

Clever title, not a lot of meat here. I have this same reaction whenever I try a new tool. How do I do this? Does it require an addon? What are the upgrades? All pretty basic 101 stuff for a new user. When I jump from WordPress to Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, I have all the same questions and frustrations.

&gt;&quot;For each of these design problems, I eventually found a fee-free solution:&quot;<p><pre><code> Sticky – WordPress 6.2 (released in March this year) adds native sticky support. Non-standard font – Twentig plug-in. Latest 3 blog posts – Team Tangible‘s Loops &amp; Logic plug-in. Gallery Lightbox – dFactory‘s responsive lightbox and gallery plug-in. </code></pre> And here&#x27;s the problem with WordPress. That&#x27;s literally 4 lines of CSS and two lines of PHP, for which the author has now exposed themselves to four seperate third party plugin developers that he must trust explicitly forever.

&gt; This post is the first in a three-part series about migrating from a self-built PHP-based Laravel backend to a managed WordPress backend.<p>This seems like a setup for a lot of apples to oranges comparisons.

When I was younger and much more into PHP as a language WordPress was a great fit for me. WordPress templating was rather obtuse for what&#x27;s supposed to be a view layer and plugins made use of some pretty exotic APIs that I found hard to understand when not being knee deep in WordPress-land.<p>Recently I moved my static blog (what it&#x27;s been since the WordPress days) to Django and Wagtail and my experience has been night and day. I think a big part of that is that Python is one of the languages I code in with some regular amount of frequency and that Django is one or two layers of abstraction below a thing like WordPress, which is much more appealing and intuitive for me as a programmer.<p>That&#x27;s to say, pick a platform in a language you like and an abstraction layer that ensures you&#x27;ll continue to have fun.

Rule of acquisition number N+1, free things are too expensive.

Tell me you don&#x27;t understand the difficulty of maintaining a really useful and complex free tool without...you know.<p>All the writer has done here is screamed their ignorance (which, to be fair, is not at all simple) of the complexities of using free&#x2F;open source and also maintaining something huge and complex WITHOUT being huge jerks about it.<p>I do wish there was a simpler way to essentially do two tiers of &quot;service&quot; -- but for now, &quot;you either &#x27;pay&#x27; in terms of digging in and learning or you &#x27;pay&#x27; with real money&quot; seems pretty reasonable.

I honestly like the Wordpress developer model. I’ve written themes and plugins. I’ve learned how to write tests for both. I like how they released the “wp-cli” so I can manage Wordpress outside the web GUI. It sometimes does feel a little janky in a lot of ways but it offers a lot of value as a framework.<p>Wordpress gets a lot of undue hate, imo. It just works, at least for me and my workloads. I worry I’ll encounter some legendary source of friction that turns many devs off to Wordpress but so far I haven’t. YMMV.

Is this post talking about hosted wordpress? Because it makes no sense at all otherwise (and even then…) Wordpress is fully customizable. Why would you need a plugin to make a menu sticky? Either I am missing something here or this OP was trying to much with its Star Trek references to actually understand how Wordpress works

Wordpress core is quite secure, remove write access outside the upload folder. It contains sticky post now and the query block. A light box has varying requirements so there is not one solution but try the builtin gallery block. And as the article mentions it has a healthy ecosystem.

User discovers paid plugins from third parties, blames first party, completely ignores the plethora of free plugins and the ability to also add it yourself, manufactured outrage ensues.

This is cool, Wordpress should have you buy &quot;latinum&quot; up front and that&#x27;s what you actually use to pay for your toolbar or custom color scheme.

<i>#10 Greed is eternal.</i>

Allow me to note that you only get to using plugins after upgrading your tier. Strangely, their lower tier plan is called &#x27;Premium&#x27;.<p>Another fundamental thing requiring upgrade is access to the canonical address if you&#x27;re using a custom domain. Control over canonical address configuration should be integral part of any paid plan, in any platform.

I hope the author goes more in detail about how the plugin &quot;Loops &amp; Logic&quot; solved their need of listing the newest blog posts. Looks like it&#x27;s a flexible templating system. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;loopsandlogic.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;loopsandlogic.com&#x2F;</a>

Basically my experience of it, I&#x27;ve never seen an open source project so hostile to open source.<p>A huge amount of features that should be in core are locked behind the proprietary &quot;jetpack&quot; SAAS.<p>The plugins repository is a hive of scum and freemium, with no way to search for only GPL compliant plugins.

Let&#x27;s not forget the horrific number and level of vulns identified in WordPress.

Wet and rainy?

Developer time is of course, free.

&gt;As web developer myself, I couldn’t help but smirk<p>&gt;Plug-in time, or change the CSS, or somehow add it to the theme itself, which I never figured out how to do<p>Ok, buddy… I think your definition of “web developer” and mine are quite different if you can’t figure out how to add a font via CSS or a theme.<p>This makes the rest of this argument garbage.